URL Encode

[jskibbie]

I have a flow where I need to post data to a webservice. The variable data needs to be URLencoded in case there are characters that would otherwise break the URL. For example: "Hello World" would need to be converted to "Hello+World" or "Hello%20World" where the space character is converted to "+" or to its hex equivalent.



Is there a way to do urlEncoding of data in Switch short of writing a urlEncode function? Has anyone already written a urlEncode function that they could share?



Thanks.

[jskibbie]

Something like this kind of works, but when there are escaped characters in the string, I get weird results:





var theValue = "Hello World";



var args = new Array();

args[0] = "/usr/bin/python";

args[1] = "-c";

args[2] = "import urllib; print urllib.quote_plus('" + theValue + "')";



var myProc = new Process(args);

myProc.start();

myProc.waitForFinished(60);



job.log(-1, myProc.readStdout() );





so "Hello World" returns: "Hello+World"...



But, "Hello "World" returns: Hello+/var/folders/zb/5rzj0zb93n51lwx521q19tsc0000gp/T/FixtureTest38/inFolder22World



Not really sure what's going on there.



I'm going to try to write a standalone python script and then see if passing theValue as an argument might work.



Any other suggestions?

[jskibbie]

I got this to work by using a separate shell script and passing theValue as an argument. Then, escaping of the argument value seemed to work correctly. I'd love it if someone had a solution that didn't involve the need for the separate shell script file so this could be all encapsulated inside of Switch, but I think some characters like a quote or apostrophe when stuck into my one-liner python call is messing it up because those characters aren't escaped properly.



The weirdness that I was experiencing has something to do with how Switch is doing logging. The URL encoded result of "Hello"World" should be: "Hello+%22World" but Switch must do a substitution when it sees "%2" in the logging, and replaces it with:



"/var/folders/zb/5rzj0zb93n51lwx521q19tsc0000gp/T/FixtureTest38/inFolder2"



so, when I was expecting to see:



"Hello+%22World", I was seeing:



"Hello+/var/folders/zb/5rzj0zb93n51lwx521q19tsc0000gp/T/FixtureTest38/inFolder22World"





Here's where I netted out for my Switch Script:





var theValue = "hello "world";



var args = new Array();

args[0] = "/usr/bin/python";

args[1] = "/path/to/shellscript/urllib_escape.py";

args[2] = theValue;



var myProc = new Process(args);

myProc.start();

myProc.waitForFinished(60);



return myProc.readLineStdout()





And my shell script is just a couple of lines:





#!/usrbin/python



import urllib, sys



#print urllib.quote_plus(sys.argv[1])



sys.stdout.write( urllib.quote_plus(sys.argv[1]) ) # print sends a linefeed at the end, so we'll use sys.stdout.write instead

[dkelly]

function urlencode( url : String )

{

function toHex( c : Number )

{

var v = "", upNib = (c >> 4);

if (upNib > 9)

v += String.fromCharCode(55+upNib);

else

v += String.fromCharCode(48+upNib);

var lowNib = (c & 0x0f);

if (lowNib > 9)

v += String.fromCharCode(55+lowNib);

else

v += String.fromCharCode(48+lowNib);

return v;

}

var encodedStr = "";

for (var i=0; i<url.length; i++) {

var c = url.charAt(i);

switch (c) {

case ":":

case "/":

case "?":

case "#":

case "[:

case ]":

case "@":

case """:

case "'":

case " ":

encodedStr += '%' + toHex(c.charCodeAt(0));

break;

default:

encodedStr += c;

break;

}

}

return encodedStr;

}



var theValue = "hello "world";

return urlencode(theValue);

[jskibbie]

Thanks Dwight! That's exactly what I was looking for.



I made a slight modification to use a regular expression vs. switch/case, I'm posting it here for grins. Users can modify the switch/cases or the regular expression to add/delete characters to be encoded.



Also, I found out from Enfocus Support that the characters "%2", "%3", through "%10" are reserved in their logging function. That explains the weird substitution I was getting when logging my result. The "%2" in my string "Hello%20World" was being substituted with Switch's "folder path' value in their job.log() function.



Thanks again!

Jim







function urlEncodeValue( url : String )

{

function toHex( c : Number )

{

var v = "", upNib = (c >> 4);

if (upNib > 9)

v += String.fromCharCode(55+upNib);

else

v += String.fromCharCode(48+upNib);

var lowNib = (c & 0x0f);

if (lowNib > 9)

v += String.fromCharCode(55+lowNib);

else

v += String.fromCharCode(48+lowNib);

return v;

}



// Anything that matches this RegExp should be encoded.

// not a wordCharacter - . ~

var re = /[^w-.~]/;

var encodedStr = "";



for (var i=0; i<url.length; i++) {

var c = url.charAt(i);

if ( c.match(re) ) {

encodedStr += '%' + toHex(c.charCodeAt(0));

}

else {

encodedStr += c;

}

}

return encodedStr;

}